Thursday, April 15, 2010

Fun with Numbers: The Last of the Baby Boomers

There are certain awards that would be a pleasure to win, like an Olympic medal, the Pulitzer Prize, or a Nobel Prize.

Likewise, there are certain awards that a person of good sense might naturally shy away from, including Class Clown, a Darwin Award, and a “Pig Book” award.

And then there are some awards which one would accept with a degree of ambivalence, like “Miss Congeniality” at the Miss America pageant.

And the Oldest American.

Mary Josephine Ray, born on May 17, 1895, died on March 8, 2010 in New Hampshire at 114 years of age. She held the distinction as the second oldest living human (about a week younger than a woman in Japan), and the oldest living person in the United States. She survived her husband by 40 years and had five great-great grandchildren.

Upon Mary’s death, the mantle for oldest living American went to Neva Morris, also 114, of Ames, Iowa. While the Gerontology Research Group says there are only 75 people over 110 (“supercentenarians”) alive worldwide, there happen to be 941 centenarians in Iowa alone. Neva—and here’s where the ambivalent part of the award comes in—died on April 7, passing on the crown, and passing on gently herself, after only a month. The oldest living American is now spry, 113-year-old Eunice Sanborn of Jacksonville, Texas.

If these three women had been born consecutively instead of contemporaneously, their combined lives would stretch back to 1669, over a century before America became a country. That sort of math makes the country feel very, very young.

One of my brothers was born in 1959. Years ago he shook the hand of a man who said to him: “You have now shaken the hand of a man who has shaken the hand of a man who shook hands with Abraham Lincoln.” That’s fewer degrees of separation than to Kevin Bacon.

In demographic terms, Mary, Neva and Eunice are all members of (what Strauss and Howe call) the “Lost Generation,” born 1883-1900. They had, generationally-speaking, a rowdy childhood followed by a life cycle divided in thirds by two world wars. Members of the Lost Generation included F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, George Gershwin, Babe Ruth and Ernest Hemingway. Their grandparents were from the Gilded Generation and their grandchildren were Boomers. If the last of their generation lives 114 years, they’ll all be gone by 2015.

Now, let’s say a combination of better living and better medicine allow Baby Boomers to live a few more years than the 114 that seems to be the limit of modern longevity. So, the last of the Baby Boomers lives to be, say, 118. (It’s possible I’ve got this wrong, that medicine is a step-function that will push us from 114 to 150 and pass everything in between.) But, if you accept the 118, and the last Baby Boomer was born in 1960, that means my generation is going to be around until 2078.

Think about that, Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Millennium and future Gen iPad and Gen Globally Warmed. You’re going to have to put up with all our good advice about how to run the world for another 68 years.

A while back I came across the “Extinction Timeline” which hypothesized the end of many things you and I might otherwise assume to be fixed. (It comes with a caveat that it not be taken too seriously.) For instance, petrol engines are gone around 2038 (makes sense), but a “good night’s sleep,” “wallets,” “peace and quiet” and the British royalty are also all gone by 2040. The “family room” is extinct by 2045, Google by 2049 and “Physical Pain and Uglyness” by 2054.

It's nice to know the Boomers will at least be beautiful for their last 20 years on earth, even if they can’t Google anything. I'm also sorry to say to the rest of you that "automobile turn signals" are not on the list of things that will be extinct; that means, by 2050, there are going to be millions of us Boomers driving with our right blinker on, intending to turn left.

But wait: the timeline predicts that “Death” will be extinct by about 2060. The youngest Boomers won’t even be 100 by then.